The Ten­nessean's Oct. 24 arti­cle by Bob Smi­etana, head­lined "Anti-Muslim cru­saders make mil­lions spread­ing fear," unfairly char­ac­ter­ized the nature of the Inves­tiga­tive Project on Ter­ror­ism and our cor­po­rate structure.

First, Mr. Smi­etana cited one line in our 2008 tax fil­ings to make the unsup­ported impli­ca­tion that our founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor, Steven Emer­son, some­how pock­eted $3,349,000 in man­age­ment fees from his rela­tion­ship with the Inves­tiga­tive Project on Ter­ror­ism Foun­da­tion. He ignored the details in our tax form that showed that $2,373,000 of that money went to pay for pro­gram expenses, such as the high costs of con­duct­ing our research, and $1,017,000 in man­age­ment and salary costs for our staff of more than 15 people.

Mr. Smi­etana said with­out attri­bu­tion that we are "spread­ing hate" and pro­vided no infor­ma­tion to back up that sub­jec­tive, opin­ion­ated claim. That goes against the accepted prac­tice of news­pa­pers keep­ing opin­ion on the edi­to­r­ial pages.

He also used loaded terms, such as "self-styled" to refer to Mr. Emer­son, who has reported on these issues for more than 25 years. Our work has been rec­og­nized by national jour­nal­ism orga­ni­za­tions such as Inves­tiga­tive Reporter and Edi­tors. His 1994 doc­u­men­tary Jihad in Amer­ica received a George Polk Award. If you are to refer to any­one who reports on or stud­ies any topic as "self-styled," wouldn't that also refer to vir­tu­ally every employee at The Ten­nessean? Are all of your court reporters lawyers? Do your police reporters have degrees in crim­i­nal justice?

Group includes Mus­lim voices

The arti­cle also made the unsup­ported asser­tion that the Inves­tiga­tive Project on Ter­ror­ism is "telling donors they're in immi­nent dan­ger from Mus­lims." That is patently false, ignores our track record and par­rots the line of the rad­i­cal groups we expose. IPT has been in the lead in iden­ti­fy­ing and assess­ing the threat of rad­i­cal Islam. Many of the sub­jects of our work are either in prison or have been deported.

A visit to our web­site — www.investigativeproject.org — will show any­one that we also have Mus­lim sup­port­ers and read­ers. One recent story focused on a sum­mit by mod­er­ate Mus­lims on Capi­tol Hill. We often fea­ture Mus­lim voices who are wag­ing a war of ideas against the Islamists, from Zuhdi Jasser at the American-Islamic Forum for Democ­racy to jour­nal­ist Asra Nomani's fight for gen­der equity within her faith, and emerg­ing voices like Abdur-Rahman Mohamed, a for­mer rad­i­cal who now com­bats extrem­ist ide­ol­ogy. These are three very dis­tinct voices with diverse back­grounds and points of view. And that's the point. There is no one voice of Mus­lims in Amer­ica, and to accept some­one or some group as play­ing that part is a form of soft bigotry.

The work of the Inves­tiga­tive Project on Ter­ror­ism is often con­tro­ver­sial, because we're expos­ing those who try to cloak their true lean­ings. That in no way makes us anti-Islam or anti-Muslim. We're proud of our work and appre­ci­ate the sup­port of those who know it best.

Ray Locker is the man­ag­ing direc­tor of the Inves­tiga­tive Project on Ter­ror­ism and a vet­eran of 28 years in the news­pa­per business.